'90s Ludlum: Notes on The Apocalypse Watch

In thinking about Robert Ludlum’s career I have tended to compare the Ludlum of the '70s, and especially the early and mid-'70s with the later Ludlum—who produced a lower output of larger and more formulaic books that significantly reused older ideas, which relied less on their political edge, or plain and simple suspense, and more on shoot 'em up action for their interest (books like The Bourne Identity and The Parsifal Mosaic rather than Trevayne or The Chancellor Manuscript). Still, reconsidering what I think of as Ludlum's three "Fourth Reich" novels--the '70s-era The Holcroft Covenant, the '80s-era The Aquitaine Progression, and the '90s-era The Apocalypse Watch--it seemed to me that there was something worth saying specifically about the Ludlum of the '90s, whose work did, indeed, seem distinctly of the decade, certainly to go by that particular book.

A logical starting point is that particular ‘90s trait, the thinness of the political premise of The Apocalypse Watch. What are these Nazis all about? What exactly are they looking to do and what is driving them, and enabling them? In contrast with the prior books' evocations of history, the sense they offered of the villains' demons, the sense of society's vulnerability to the madmen and their manipulations counted for something, this time around the villains' objects and sponsors are discussed in only the vaguest manner, which leaves them looking a hazier, weaker foe than in those preceding uses of the theme, the more so for this book's particular plot structure. In those earlier books the villains seemed like giants, and the hero a lone man because of how untouchable the villains are, and how these untouchable villains have put a target on his back, forcing him on the run. In line with this pattern, when writing professional intelligence operatives Ludlum made a point of alienating them from their organization--to the point that their own people are targeting them (The Matarese Circle, The Bourne Identity, The Parsifal Mosaic). By contrast The Apocalypse Watch's Drew Latham comes off as merely a cop walking a beat, and in line with that duty tackling a pack of particularly nasty but essentially commonplace gangsters. (It factors into the sense of cop drama-ness about it that in contrast with the usual globetrotting Ludlum narratives Latham's activities are mostly confined to a single metro area, and that in the midst of his running about his superior calls him a "loose cannon.")

As one might guess the scenario, even beyond its familiarity, has less edge, and the author endeavors to make up for it with action, the reliance on which is exceedingly heavy even by late Ludlum standards. The book really piles shootout atop shootout atop shootout--indeed, piles commando raid atop commando raid atop commando raid--through its six hundred pages. At their best serviceable rather than, to use that descriptor Ludlum liked so much, "brilliant," the sequences' details become repetitious, two separate scenes of the type entailing the heroes' stumbling upon prostitutes who just so happen to have been hired by their targets, and whose disgust with their "johns" makes them amenable to aiding the commandos' infiltration of the target’s residence. Connected with this was another break with Ludlum's usual pattern, namely the techno-thriller/sci-fi touches--from mind-controlling computer chips implanted in people's heads, to giant World War II-era Messerschmitt gliders, to a "They saved Hitler’s brain!"-type twist at the end, that, unfortunately, are of a piece with the comparative sloppiness of the plotting (with much in the overstuffed concoction amounting to little, and much not properly followed up, like, you know, the Nazis setting the Bundestag on fire).

Meanwhile, in those portions of the book in which there isn’t actually shooting (there are some) the author offers up the kind of "snappy" dialogue that drags out a scene without enriching it, and which while far from unprecedented in Ludlum’s work, still felt as if it belonged to a different "voice." Where Ludlum himself remarked particular characters of his older works as sounding like they came from the "thirties . . . [of] the late night television films" (The Matlock Paper) or "thirties Harvard with . . . pretentious emphasis" (Trevayne) in apparent obliviousness to how much his books in general sound like that, here what the dialogue recalled was stereotyped hard-boiled crime, with the evocation displaying a self-consciousness and show-offiness and glee about their anachronism. This seemed all the more telling given the metafictional indulgences (the pseudo-hardboiled dialogue apart, a minor plot point centering on a character’s attempt to buy an Aston Martin DB4, which car’s appearance in Goldfinger is mentioned more than once, while Latham's father’s work as an archaeologist inevitably meant an Indiana Jones reference).

All in all picking up this Ludlum novel felt like picking up a big Jack Ryan hardback and finding an Op-Center novel inside (and as the dialogue testifies, occasionally like Robert Ludlum-meets-the-Gilmore Girls). In fact, I would not be surprised to find that Ludlum had started the book (there is a genuinely Ludlumesque feel to some of the earlier material--something of his prose and his sensibility evident the initial scene in the Nazi facility in Austria, and later the Jean-Pierre Villiers subplot), that the author had for whatever reason been unable to meet his schedule (burning out, perhaps, after so many years and books and amid the collapsing market for his sort of fare the ‘90s?), and then handed the work over to some jobbing writer to finish it, who either decided, or was told, to go for a book that was more "contemporary" or "hipper"--all of which seems the more plausible given how Ludlum was so soon to be "co-authoring" books in great numbers, by and large blander, virtually mass-manufactured books of the kind that have characterized so much more of popular fiction since--and which, when I find myself looking for a piece of light reading, send me running back to the more satisfying thrillers of earlier times.